The submission of our project proposals last weekend has got me thinking more and more about this final project, so for this week's post, I want to talk a little bit about our project outline. I would love to get feedback and suggestions from anyone reading this post, all constructive criticism is welcome!
Our project centers around the Victorian to modern taxidermy in Western society; we are comparing this practice to the intentional mummification behaviors of past pre-industrial societies, making the argument that taxidermy is a type of "modern-day mummification" based on the motivations behind both practices.
We suggest that what motivated mummification of human individuals and what also motivates the taxidermy of animals is either affection for the individual or a sense of conquest or ownership over the individual. We will support this argument with examples and academic literature concerning both taxidermy and mummification.
Another facet to our argument is that both taxidermy and mummification are utilized by participants to formulate either an individual or a group identity, and that this identity represents a relation with the taxidermied or mummified individual, again, either an affection for or conquest of said individual. For example, the use of taxidermied exotic animals in museums, particularly by early colonial explorers, could represent the identity of the conquering Western power and their abilities to "tame" the exotica.
Our project will be presented in a series of blogs. I think this works well because a) everyone in the class knows how to use Blogger (I hope), b) it will allow us to engage in a discussion of the topic and present our argument in structured, linear format, and c) we can hopefully receive feedback and questions from our classmates directly on our project, and elaborate on the comments we receive.
I'm starting to get quite excited about this project because I have never done such a large assignment in this web format, nor have I done any study of taxidermy, so I'm bound to learn something. If anyone has any suggestions about what we should or should not include or, even better, any suggestions for sources or visual media that we could include for our blog, I'd love to hear them!
Our project centers around the Victorian to modern taxidermy in Western society; we are comparing this practice to the intentional mummification behaviors of past pre-industrial societies, making the argument that taxidermy is a type of "modern-day mummification" based on the motivations behind both practices.
We suggest that what motivated mummification of human individuals and what also motivates the taxidermy of animals is either affection for the individual or a sense of conquest or ownership over the individual. We will support this argument with examples and academic literature concerning both taxidermy and mummification.
Another facet to our argument is that both taxidermy and mummification are utilized by participants to formulate either an individual or a group identity, and that this identity represents a relation with the taxidermied or mummified individual, again, either an affection for or conquest of said individual. For example, the use of taxidermied exotic animals in museums, particularly by early colonial explorers, could represent the identity of the conquering Western power and their abilities to "tame" the exotica.
Our project will be presented in a series of blogs. I think this works well because a) everyone in the class knows how to use Blogger (I hope), b) it will allow us to engage in a discussion of the topic and present our argument in structured, linear format, and c) we can hopefully receive feedback and questions from our classmates directly on our project, and elaborate on the comments we receive.
I'm starting to get quite excited about this project because I have never done such a large assignment in this web format, nor have I done any study of taxidermy, so I'm bound to learn something. If anyone has any suggestions about what we should or should not include or, even better, any suggestions for sources or visual media that we could include for our blog, I'd love to hear them!
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